He said: "We want to treat patients as early as possible in the disease before they have paralysis due to myelin damage, once the myelin is destroyed, it's hard to repair that."

Dr Susan Kohlhaas, head of biomedical research at the MS Society, said: "Being able to specifically stop the immune system attacking myelin but still keeping it fully functional poses an exciting potential therapy for people with MS.

"We were interested to see this novel way of re-programming the immune system shown to be well tolerated in this very small study.

"More research is now needed and we eagerly await the results of any future larger clinical trials of this therapy."